﻿REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR IQIO 2-7 



in his published preliminary work on the Lyon Mountain and Union 

 Springs occurrences. 



PALEONTOLOGY 

 Monograph of the Eurypterida. This work, referred to in 

 previous reports as in preparation, is now on the press. To indi- 

 cate the general purport and scope of the work the preface to the 

 volume is here appended : 



While the senior author of this work was engaged in the prepar- 

 ation of the monograph of the American Devonic Crustacea, which 

 constituted volume 7 of the Palaeontology of New York (1888), 

 the forms of the Eurypterida there presented for consideration led 

 to the impression that it would be a service to paleontology to restate 

 in detail the structure of this unique group of extinct creatures. 

 The Siluric rocks of New York had long been so profuse in these 

 remains that the material was not wanting for such analysis and 

 the late Professor James Hall, who in 1859 had given the most inti- 

 mate account of the eurypterids known up to that time, concurred 

 in the belief that the thirty years which had then passed would, with 

 the aid of accumulated data and in the light of the contributions 

 made by other writers, afford new facts worth recording. Not long 

 after this Gerhard Holm published his very remarkable analysis of 

 the structure of Eurypterus based on specimens from the Baltic 

 Siluric and on the appearance of this exhaustive memoir it seemed 

 that the anatomy of the group could hardly be supplemented except 

 by the estimation of specific and generic differences, and the study 

 of the habitudes of these animals. Notwithstanding, as early as 

 1895 I began the assemblage of materials looking specially to a 

 revision of the New York and American eurypterid faunas. The col- 

 lections of the State Museum were already pretty well supplied with 

 representatives from the well-known localities at Buffalo and in 

 Herkimer county and now these collections have been vastly ampli- 

 fied, first by repeated acquisitions from the Herkimer county local- 

 ities during the past fifteen years, again by the close study of all 

 outcrops of the Eurypterus beds along the line between Herkimer 

 county and Buffalo which has progressed in connection with the 

 field work in areal geology, then by the courtesy of the trustees of 

 the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences who in 1898, by special 

 vote, placed at my disposal the extraordinary assemblage of speci- 

 mens from the Buffalo cement quarries which is known, from the 

 name of its principal contributor, as the Lewis J. Bennett collec- 

 tion. Soon thereafter followed the discovery of the Eurypterus- 

 bearing black shales at Pittsford, Monroe county, which were 

 brought to light by the work of enlargement of the Erie canal in 

 1895, the species of which were described by Mr Clifton J. Sarle in 

 our reports, from material now in possession of the State Museum. 

 To this notable addition to our knowledge has been added in years 

 still more recent the new fauna in the dark shales of the Shawan- 



